Advised by General Lee, the inhabitants of the town now began to refugee to the rear. They went in the dark, in a snow storm, afoot, in vehicles and some in a railway train, upon which the Northern guns opened heavy fire. They slept in barns, cabins and the homes of country people, and left behind their silverware and fine old china, their paintings and portraits and every kind of property, all of which was doomed to destruction.
But the town was not shelled and a few at a time many of the old men and the women, the boys and girls, crept back from impossible shelters in the country to their homes in the town.
Then, twenty-two days later, at dawn of December 11th, at a signal from the “Long Tom” on Scott’s Hill, at Falmouth, Burnside opened on the town, now half full of residents, with one hundred and eighty-one guns. The guns were placed along Stafford Heights from the Washington Farm to Falmouth, and the whole fire was concentrated on the town, where walls toppled, fires sprang up and chaos reigned.
Frequently the Union gunners fired a hundred guns a minute, round shot, case shot and shell. The quick puffs of smoke, touched in the center with flame, ran incessantly along the hills and a vast thunder echoed thirty miles away. Soon the town was under a pall of smoke, through which lifted the white spires of the churches.
“The scenes following the bombardment,” says John Esten Cooke, in “Jackson,” “were cruel. Men, women and children were driven from town. Hundreds of ladies and children were seen wandering homeless over the frozen highways, with bare feet and thin clothing. Delicately nurtured girls walked hurriedly over the various roads, seeking some friendly roof to cover them.”
The following article by one who, as a little girl, was in Fredericksburg on the day of the bombardment, catches a glimpse of it in a personal way that is more convincing than pages of description.
The Shelling of Fredericksburg
Recollections of Mrs. Frances Bernard Goolrick (Mrs. John T. Goolrick) who was a little girl at that time.
During the stormy winter of 1862, my mother, a widow with three little children, was still in her native place, Fredericksburg, Virginia. Many of the inhabitants had long since left for Richmond and other points farther south, for the town lying just between the hostile armies was the constant scene of raids and skirmishes, and no one knew at what instant everything might be swept away from them. My mother, separated from her relatives by the fortunes of war, decided that it would be best for her to remain where she was and thus probably save the household effects she had gathered around her. The strongest arguments had been used by friends in town and relatives at a distance to induce her to leave for a place of more safety, but so far without avail, and though we were often alarmed by raids into town, as yet we had sustained no injuries of any description. In the fall the Federal army, under General Burnside, was on the Stafford hills just across the river, and it was constantly rumored that the town would be bombarded; but lulled to an insecure rest by many false alarms, the people had but little faith in these rumors.
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